Difficulties for travel Companies in today’s travel age
With OTA’s like “Make My Trip” and “Yatra” dominating the travel market, traditional travel companies have been losing the market share since the boom of E-commerce. Travel companies do not have online presence like these OTA’s. Majority of the travel industry was too late into getting to the online spaces and are not able to compete with the travel technology, OTA’s have implemented to make their online booking easier and consumer friendly. The OTA’s have a defined and standardised customer experience while travel companies, due to the nature of their operation, provide very different service standards to different customers, since the customer is aware of the experience they will get with OTA’s, that makes it easier for them to choose how they prepare for their travel.
Travel Companies who function in a more traditional method, have a very complex system which is expensive and time-consuming. With the internet, customers can get information of their product more transparently, have the opportunity to check reviews and evaluate the experience of other travellers, this transparency is not available while going through the traditional method of booking through travel companies who use archaic methods of acquiring the travel product. Travel companies might be behind OTA’s when it comes to how rapidly OTA’s acquire market share.
The use of more traditional and archaic methods means that the technology used is a closed interface, not allowing the technology to update with the times. There is always new innovations in the travel industry that benefits all stakeholders of the industry and with travel companies having a closed interface, it makes it difficult to collaborate and work together.
Another huge problem for travel companies is the duplicated data they receive and the cluttering it creates to the database making the entire process time consuming as the entries to be made are doubled, the customer profile has to be created twice and then it takes more unnecessary time to remove the duplicated data. To collect duplicated data, enter it only to remove them is a waste of human capital and time. Travel companies invest in creating customer persona using the data they receive from their sources, one advantage that travel companies have that OTA’s do not have is to understand that each consumer’s spending and need is unique, companies are equipped to hyper-personalise customer service.
